Lou Reed

Urgent action needed to avoid ‘lost generation’, says the former Labour health secretary’s report, due on Thursday

Britain risks a 25% rise in the number of young people not in work or education to 1.25 million by the early 2030s without urgent government action to avoid a “lost generation”, a landmark report has warned.

Alan Milburn, the leader of the review into why so many young people are economically inactive, said the UK risked opening up a “generational fault line” between young and old without urgent steps to overhaul schools, the health service, the welfare system and the jobs market.

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After being denied their rightful place in this season’s Europa League, Crystal Palace finally have their revenge. In Oliver Glasner’s final match in charge, it was fitting that Jean-Philippe Mateta should score what turned out to be the winning goal after his January move to Milan was scuppered by a failed medical. It has been that kind of season in south London. Having rescued them from the brink of extinction only 16 years ago, how Steve Parish must have relished this occasion.

The Palace chair found himself sitting next to the Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin for the biggest night in their history and he can now start planning for the Europa League campaign that was denied to them as last year’s FA Cup winners were adjudged to have broken European football’s governing body’s rules on multiclub ownership.

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Anna Turley gives Reform leader 24 hours to report Russian hacking claim in ‘public and national interest’

The Labour chair has given Nigel Farage 24 hours to report to security services the claim that his phone was hacked by Russia-linked actors or the party will do it for him.

In a letter to the Reform UK leader, Anna Turley said it was “in the public and national interest” to ensure that a suspected overseas hack of a senior politician’s phone by a hostile state was properly investigated.

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Across California, ballots sit unopened as voters struggle to decide who to back as their chosen candidate for governor. US senior political correspondent Lauren Gambino tells Kai Wright that the race has been a head-scratcher for Democrats. Despite a huge field of candidates, the race has been mired in scandal and few have managed to cut through. What does this say about the future of the Democratic party, and does this leave an opening for Republicans in the Golden state?

• Is boring back? The California governor’s race and the fight for the future of the Democratic party

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US president calls on US ally to ‘behave … or else we’ll have to blow them up’ in casual aside during cabinet meeting

Donald Trump has threatened to “blow up” Oman if it fails to “behave” in a casual aside during a cabinet meeting, as the US scrambles to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

The US president made the threat after reports of talks between Iran and Oman about jointly charging a toll for ships passing through the crucial waterway, which has been all but closed since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran.

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A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area.

The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a vanished species and help Britain adapt to a very modern problem: climate change.

Britain is famous for drizzle, but climate change is making rainfall heavier and more erratic. Places that didn’t used to flood are now waterlogged. So scientists have enlisted some of the animal kingdom’s best flood engineers — beavers — to help.

In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.

“They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding,” explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it’s located.

The beaver-engineered landscape has attracted other animals, increasing the area’s biodiversity:

“By felling trees, they’ve also opened up the canopy, and we’ve seen an abundance of biodiversity,” McCormack says.

Freshwater shrimp have appeared in the creek, he says, plus eight new species of birds, two types of bats and rare brown hairstreak butterflies, which lay their eggs on blackthorn branches nibbled by beavers.

Tags: beavers · climate crisis · UK · video

Cloud data warehouse Snowflake plans to spend $6 billion on Amazon’s custom Graviton CPUs and AI accelerators over the next five years. The collab aims to reduce friction in connecting Snowflake customer data with a growing number of AI services built atop AWS’ cloud infrastructure. “We are making it easier for enterprises to bring AI directly to governed data, so they can move faster, operate with greater density and create measurable impact at scale,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a canned statement. Snowflake is a long-time AWS customer, having built the company atop the cloud titan's servers going back to 2011. Over the past few years, Snowflake has shifted an increasing amount of compute from Intel and AMD CPUs to Amazon’s own Arm-based Graviton instances. Now in their fifth generation, Amazon’s latest Graviton processors cram 192 Arm Neoverse V3 cores which are fed by 12 channels of memory up to 8800 MT/s. As we’ve previously reported, CPUs are back in the spotlight again after years of being overshadowed by GPUs and other AI accelerators. The models themselves still run on GPUs, but the tools and functions those models call — a SQL query or Python script, for example — do not. Those workloads still rely on CPUs. This has driven renewed demand for CPU cores as each agent’s performance is inherently limited by how quickly the processor can service the request. Under the agreement, Snowflake will run and train its GenAI models and services using a combination of GPUs running in AWS and Graviton CPU cores. For example, Snowflake says that its Cortex AI platform can convert natural language to SQL queries, summarize data, and conduct sentiment analysis. According to Amazon, Snowflake’s lifetime AWS marketplace sales crossed $7 billion and exceeded $2 billion during the 2025 calendar year. Clearly the data warehousing platform is betting these AI tools will continue to drive revenues enough to justify splashing $1.2 billion a year on additional infrastructure. Gamble or not, Wall Street doesn't seem to worried, with Snowflake rallying by more than 30 percent in after hours trading Wednesday. Snowflake isn’t the only company diving deeper into Graviton’s orbit. Back in April, Meta revealed plans to deploy tens of millions of Amazon’s Graviton 5 CPU cores. The multi-year collaboration was expected to make the social network one of the biggest consumers of AWS’ homegrown silicon. Much like Snowflake’s $6 billion investment in Amazon’s infrastructure, Meta’s cloud spend is largely aimed at securing cores for AI agents. But unlike Snowflake, which for better or worse remains heavily reliant on AWS for compute, Meta’s tie up may only be a stopgap while it awaits Arm’s buzzword-packed AGI CPUs. ®

Another Starship launch, another Federal Aviation Administration-mandated grounding and mishap investigation that couldn’t come at a worse time as SpaceX attempts to court investors for what could be the largest IPO in history. As we reported earlier this week, Friday’s launch of the latest iteration of Starship atop its Super Heavy booster started off well enough, but things went sideways during the booster’s return sequence. After separating from Starship, the Super Heavy booster attempted its flip maneuver and boostback burn, but engine relight issues prevented a controlled descent, and the craft ended up in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to air traffic delays. Starship reached space, but trouble with one of its Raptor engines forced SpaceX to cancel a planned in-space relight test, further delaying efforts to demonstrate controlled deorbit capability. It took until Wednesday for the FAA to declare the Super Heavy anomaly a formal mishap, and that means Starship is grounded while SpaceX conducts an FAA-directed investigation to determine what went wrong. This was Starship’s 12th launch, and marked the sixth time the FAA has grounded it in the past three years. SpaceX hasn’t issued a statement on the FAA mishap investigation (we asked, but didn't hear back), instead focusing on the successes of the launch – namely the deployment of 20 Starlink satellite dummies and a couple of modified satellites that took pictures of the craft in space, all of which were burned up in Earth’s atmosphere following the launch. To be fair to the Muskian outfit, both Starship itself and the Super Heavy booster were new versions, which means errors are more likely to occur, but a 50/50 FAA grounding rate for launches doesn’t exactly bode well for the company's plans to go public in grand fashion. The public filing, released earlier this month, paints a picture of a company that’s losing billions at an accelerating rate - SpaceX’s full FY 2025 saw the company lose $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion in revenue; in Q1 2026 alone the company lost $4.3 billion on $4.7 billion of revenue, thanks in large part to its recent acquisition of xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence initiative, which requires heavy capital expenditures. Despite these numbers and reports in its risk statement that some of its ideas might just not work (like Starship, so far), SpaceX still claims that it has a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, which is just a little short of the gross national product of the entire United States. The IPO filing further asserts that founder Elon Musk is “one of the great visionaries of our generation,” and that SpaceX is “the only company that has cracked the code on accessing space at scale” despite reality butting up hard against its ability to scale beyond Falcon 9. If SpaceX keeps causing delays to NASA's Moon mission timeline, the whole thing might explode in investors’ faces. ®

Als het aan Wim Beelen ligt, wordt er deze zomer al gespeeld in zijn nieuwe pretpark op Rotterdam-Zuid. De ondernemer hoopt op korte termijn een buitenspeeltuin te creëren voor kinderen tot 14 jaar. Jeugd uit Rotterdam-Zuid is volgens hem gratis welkom.

Rex Parker

The night gardener, Tine Poppe

Roku is rolling out its first major homescreen update in a decade. The UI doesn't look too dramatically different, but users will notice more personalization-driven changes, including frequently used apps, "top picks," household-specific layouts, and recommendations based on viewing habits. Rest assured, Engadget adds, "Everything is still in various shades of purple and Roku City is still available as a screensaver." From the report: Today's update certainly brings more clutter into the mix, including a new "marquee" ad spot that takes up a large chunk of the screen. It's worth remembering that Roku makes most of its money on ads and not its hardware. "More than 100 million households will feel the difference the moment they turn on their TV -- and it opens up a better, more powerful experience for our partners as well," CEO Anthony Wood wrote in a blog post.

The update does bring one novel feature, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The company says the new homescreen platform will adapt to how households use Roku devices. This is to accommodate "multiple people living in homes." For instance, a child's bedroom TV might have a different homescreen than TV in the living room, and so forth. This expansion is rolling out right now to US-based customers, though it might take a while to reach every user. Roku says "additional countries will follow in the coming months."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Markus Branse has added a photo to the pool:

Lightning seen from Bicentenniel Park, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

Markus Branse has added a photo to the pool:

Lightning seen from Bicentenniel Park, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo of the “Buddhist Hosenji Temple” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max while visiting the “Dotonbori River Shopping Area” in Osaka, Japan. The smoke is from the bundled incense offered in prayers…

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo with my iPhone 17 Pro Max while visiting the “Dotonbori River Shopping Area” in Osaka, Japan. I was intrigued by all the electrical wires connecting across the small, busy street. This is a very busy and bustling area to visit…

on the water photography has added a photo to the pool:

This facility was originally built and famously known as the Kumamoto-Kita Police Station. The Kusabacho building (now the Central Police Station) is globally celebrated for its striking modern design. Designed by the legendary architect Kazuo Shinohara and completed in 1990 under the "Kumamoto Art Polis" initiative, it is often called the "glass police station". The front facade is wrapped entirely in reflective half-mirror glass, utilizing a distinct steel-frame design expanding outward on the upper floors to house a custom martial arts hall.

NEW YORK (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Aandelen van Meta Platforms waren woensdag in trek onder beleggers op Wall Street. Het moederbedrijf van Facebook en Instagram is begonnen met de verkoop van de eerste consumentenabonnementen voor zijn Meta AI-chatbot. Dat wordt gezien als een belangrijke stap in het opbouwen van een businessmodel dat de honderden miljarden dollars aan investeringen in kunstmatige intelligentie moet compenseren.

De beurswaarde steeg bijna 4 procent. Het Meta AI-abonnement wordt eerst uitgerold in Singapore, Guatemala en Bolivia, met plannen voor meer landen later. Mensen kunnen de Meta AI-chatbot gratis blijven gebruiken voor het genereren van afbeeldingen en video's, maar stuiten bij veelvuldig gebruik dan uiteindelijk op een limiet.

Meta-topman Mark Zuckerberg staat onder druk van beleggers om aan te tonen dat zijn dure gok op AI uiteindelijk significante omzet zal opleveren. Zijn bedrijf is ook al bezig met het testen van premiumabonnementen die exclusieve AI-functies toevoegen aan Facebook, Instagram en WhatsApp.

De belangrijkste graadmeters van de aandelenbeurzen in New York eindigden licht in de plus, terwijl beleggers tegenstrijdige signalen kregen over de vooruitzichten voor een akkoord tussen de Verenigde Staten en Iran om de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten te beëindigen. De Dow Jones-index ging 0,4 procent omhoog naar 50.644,28 punten. De brede S&P 500 sloot een fractie hoger op 7520,36 punten en techbeurs Nasdaq kreeg er 0,1 procent bij op 26.674,73 punten.

President Donald Trump zei dat hij "niet tevreden" was met de onderhandelingen met Iran, wat de verwachtingen voor een op handen zijnd akkoord temperde. De VS ontkenden daarnaast een Iraans mediabericht over een tussentijds conceptakkoord waarin stond dat het scheepvaartverkeer door de Straat van Hormuz binnen een maand na inwerkingtreding weer normaal zou kunnen verlopen. Trump bagatelliseerde ook de mogelijkheid van verlichting van sancties tegen Iran.

Verder wist Boeing de aandacht op zich gericht. De topman van Boeing gaf investeerders een optimistische voorspelling voor dit jaar en daarna, nu de Amerikaanse vliegtuigbouwer de productie van de 737 MAX opvoert, de certificering van lang uitgestelde modellen nadert en een meevaller uit defensie-uitgaven verwacht. Beleggers zetten het aandeel daarop 2,5 procent hoger.